


You Lift Me Up And I Am Found

by ecstasyseeker



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Kid Fic, Natasha Romanov Is Not A Robot, Unplanned Pregnancy, and i oop, coparents!stevenat is my vice, why are my oneshots always short
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-23
Updated: 2019-06-23
Packaged: 2020-05-16 20:35:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,117
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19325617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ecstasyseeker/pseuds/ecstasyseeker
Summary: It had only been a year since The Snap, one measly trip of the Earth around the sun since they lost. They weren’t ready for something like this, like a baby. They weren’t prepared, they never could’ve seen it coming. And why would they be?Everyone else left to be with their people. Tony to be with Pepper and the child they were expecting, Thor to be with the remaining Asgardians, Bruce to sort out his own internal battles. Steve and Natasha didn’t go anywhere, because they were each other’s people. They were all each other had, and that was what they held onto even in the darkest, most dismal days.





	You Lift Me Up And I Am Found

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this at a family gathering to which my Grandpa’s neighbor brought her son. He is 1 and he has strawberry blond hair with blue green eyes which is a detrimental combination when it comes to my emotional stability. It’s been two months since Endgame, but I still lose my mind about it at least once a day. One of my coping mechanisms is James Rogers. This basically wrote itself, the words jumped out of my barely-coherent thoughts and into my phone, so it’s probably just about the messiest thing you’ve ever read. Enjoy. Or don’t, and just burn me at the stake or something perhaps less extreme. 
> 
> Title from the song Helium by Sia. It has gone through my vetting protocol and I have deemed it a SteveNat song.

When Natasha and Steve first found out about the Fetus-Eventually-Known-as-James, neither of them believed the situation to be reality. And why would they? 

It had only been a year since The Snap, one measly trip of the Earth around the sun since they lost. They weren’t ready for something like this, like a baby. They weren’t prepared, they never could’ve seen it coming. And why would they be?

Everyone else left to be with their people. Tony to be with Pepper and the child they were expecting, Thor to be with the remaining Asgardians, Bruce to sort out his own internal battles. Steve and Natasha didn’t go anywhere, because they were each other’s people. They were all each other had, and that was what they held onto even in the darkest, most dismal days. 

It’s no surprise that a sexual relationship had formed between them. It had before The Snap, in fact. Enough high stakes situations and close calls tend to draw people closer to one another, and if they couldn’t relieve the tension around them, they could at least relieve it between them.

They never talked about the status of their relationship and that was okay. It just wasn’t high on their list of conversation topics, because it was very much present on the list of things they just wordlessly understood. They understood the insurmountable importance they had to each other as a partner in every sense of the word without needing to discuss it. But they also knew that their lifestyle had its’ limitations- the wrong business and all that. It took a long time for Natasha to even allow herself to feel what she felt for Steve, to accept it, and damned if she would ever say it out loud. That type of emotion, that type of connection wasn’t supposed to be achievable in a life like hers, so she reconciled by allowing it to exist without verbally acknowledging its existence. That was, until Thanos came and snapped away everything she’d come to know. 

When the dust had settled (literally) and she got a moment to breathe through her still-shaking lungs beneath her aching ribs, she looked at Steve. Steve was looking at her, too. 

She looked at him and said the words she’d been thinking for so long, too long, and allowed tears to stream down her face anew. As soon as she’d said them once, it felt impossible to stop saying them, and they poured from her lips like the tears pouring from her eyes. She wrapped her arms around him, her fingers buried tightly into the undershirt he hadn’t had time to change since the battle, her sobs and pleas muffled into his shoulder, and she vowed never to let him go. 

Nothing sounded quite like Steve telling her he loved her, too. 

And so they were, in the days, weeks, months following. Each other’s rock, each other’s anchor, each other’s home... everything they were before and so much more. There was no more Sam, no more Bucky, no more Avengers as they knew them. They both decided not to physically conduct missions, Natasha choosing to oversee them and Steve preferring to be kept out of the shuffle entirely. He got a job in the city like a normal person and tried to actually be one. Truth be told, the only time he ever felt normal anymore was when he was with Natasha. 

When two pink lines, encased in cheap plastic, about a millimeter in width, entered their lives, they once again knew that they would never be the same. 

It wasn’t until the fourth month of pregnancy that they even thought to buy a test, because Steve was clueless to every female body but Natasha’s, and Natasha believed she was infertile, so he did too. Missing periods wasn’t alarming to her, having had irregular ones all her life. Morning sickness was dismissed thanks to both Steve and Natasha’s lack of cooking skills. It was only when Natasha stood in front of a mirror in what, unbeknownst to her, was the fourteenth week, scrutinizing the slight and unusual curve of her abdomen for any thoughts of what if to pierce through the denial she’d ingrained into herself since the Red Room. 

So she did all either of them knew to do, go to the drugstore and buy one of those sticks like the normal women do on TV. She peed on it (which inflicted a hairline fracture of her dignity, although she’d done worse), and they waited. Then they got their results. 

Once they got past the initial shock (several hours later), they came to the conclusion that this was a good thing. This was something that would give them hope. This was something that would give them purpose, that reminded them that they’re still alive and they’d better start acting like it. 

The rest of the pregnancy went by quickly, too quickly for Natasha and Steve to really wrap their minds around the prospect of being parents. It was a whirlwind of doctors appointments and hormones and cravings (God, when had she become so stereotypical?), which wasn’t exactly enjoyable, but it was good, too. Good was an understatement. There were no words in any of the nine languages Natasha knew to describe what it felt like to feel her baby kick for the first time. 

Everything that came with it, stereotypes and all, this experience was completely and uniquely theirs. It took Tony strolling into the compound unannounced one morning when Natasha was already obviously showing for them to even tell anyone, and that evening they received an angry call from Pepper that was equal parts scolding them for keeping this to themselves and making baby shower plans.

Before they knew it, Natasha had the tiniest thing she’d ever seen in her arms, and he was hers. She was a mother, something she never thought she’d be, to a son, something she never thought she’d have. He was all big blue eyes and soft red hair and perfection. Although it was just about as cliche as anything could be, she didn’t know it was humanly possible to love something as much as she loved the child in her arms. Steve held him in his arms, too, after some not-so-gentle coaxing from Natasha in response to his qualms about his strength accidentally hurting the tiny person. It was spectacular and terrifying at the same time, but nothing measured up to the joy both she and Steve felt holding their baby. Their baby. On some level, they almost felt guilty. Experiencing that amount of joy in a world post-Thanos almost felt wrong, but it also felt more right than anything ever had. 

They named their son James Samuel Nicholas Rogers, a way to memorialize some of the most important people in their lives. People they’d lost. People they wanted to be part of their son’s life, even if they never got the chance to meet him. (Steve had argued that maybe two middle names was a bit much, but Natasha persisted on both in place of a hyphenated last name, because if they were going for meaningful, the surname Rogers meant a hell of a lot more to her than Romanoff did. She told Steve she’d never had the last name of anyone who’d ever loved her, and suddenly Steve was hellbent on fixing that. He proposed to and married her right there in the hospital room with their newborn son between them and Pepper was probably going to throw another fit for not being able to plan a bachelorette party. They were already a family, but if there was ever a doubt before, there sure wasn’t one now.) 

(Natasha also found it amusing that Steve had been her fake fiancé in the mall in DC longer than he’d been her real fiancé, but sometimes that’s just how life works out.)

Neither of the new parents had any clue what they were doing. Natasha had grown up without any sort of mother figure, and Steve’s father had been killed in World War I before Steve was born, so they weren’t exactly up to their ears in role models. But, slowly but surely with no shortage of teasing remarks a la Tony, they figured it out. They wanted to give James all the love they could possibly manage, the happy and healthy childhood neither of them had, and every day was spent ensuring that. James did become their purpose, and they were glad for that. James was their life, their perfect little family was the center of the world that was otherwise full of despair and regret. They still wished with everything they had that there was a way to bring back the fallen, but James’ existence dulled the pain of grief that still lingered, on some days more than others. 

Both Steve and Natasha had come a long way from when they’d first met back on the Helicarrier more than seven years before. Steve was fresh out of the ice, more than half his mind stuck in the forties, overwhelmed by the home and the life he’d lost. Everything, everyone he’d known had been ripped away. For a long time, he didn’t want to belong anywhere other than where he couldn’t return to. Natasha changed that rather quickly. 

She became his teammate, his partner, his friend, and so much more. He was able to build a new life, and she was his home. Even when he’d had nothing, he had Bucky, and then even when he didn’t have Bucky, he had Natasha. And now he had James, too. He was a father, something he never anticipated or even knew he could anticipate. The love of his life was the mother of his son. That was something he didn’t think he’d ever fully understand, how they got to where they were given their circumstances. 

Natasha had changed, too. Over the years, she grew alongside Steve, with Steve as an undeniable force in her life. He knew her better than anyone ever had, and he’d become more important to her than she’d ever imagined a person could be. She was no longer the cold, unfeeling, shell of everything that makes one human that the Red Room had tried so adamantly to make her into. She overcame the training, the abuse, and she took her life back. The one thing the Red Room never could’ve expected was this. Being a mother. To Captain America’s baby, no less. She’d be lying if she said that didn’t bring her more satisfaction that just about anything ever had. (And she might be a damn good liar, courtesy of said training, but she hasn’t needed that skill in a long time. She traded it in for skills like feeding an infant and managing tantrums and getting that revolting green baby food out of her hair thanks to James being the messiest eater on the planet. This proved to be yet another thing she never would’ve anticipated but wouldn’t trade for the world.) 

By any standards, they’re both compromised beyond belief just by the love they have for each other and their family, but they can’t bring themselves to care. This is exactly where they want to be, where they never knew they could be. 

Watching James grow, watching happiness and positivity thrive through him in the wake of the greatest tragedy the universe has experienced... it’s nothing short of incredible. Watching James’ eyes flutter in his sleep, wondering about what he could possibly be dreaming about. Watching James react to the sweetness of mashed peaches or the somehow still soft texture of his worn stuffed goat. Watching James play with Morgan on the splash pad at Disney’s Grand Floridian Resort while Tony and Pepper enjoy some “much needed” time at the spa. Watching James smash cake onto his face on his birthday, making a mess that Steve will certainly be the one to clean up later while Natasha cleans the child himself. Watching James giggle as he tears open presents on Christmas morning, surrounded by the love of his parents and later, his extended family. Tony, Pepper, Morgan, Rhodey, Happy, Nebula, Carol, even the Raccoon all gather at the facility and light candles for those who couldn’t be there. 

For such a tiny little person, the change he brought into the lives of Steve and Natasha was gargantuan. The struggles, the sleep deprivation, the smiles, the incomparable joy. They’ll never be the same again, not that they want to be who they were before James. This is who they are, husband and wife, parents to this difficult but beautiful kid, a messy and confused but ever so loving family.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!!! Comments and/or kudos are greatly appreciated if you liked it!!! (If you didn't like it, this is awkward. Have a nice day regardless.)


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